Week 1: How to practice when there's no time 
Welcome to Week one of "Change your Habits, Change your Playing" with Phil Goldenberg! This is the thread for posting your submissions and assignments for the first week!
Watch Phil's Livestream on June 7th here!
Assignment:
Pick a challenging 20-30 second spot in your repertoire. Play it once or twice, then record it. Then, practice that section in a hyper-focused matter for exactly 3 minutes, then record it again and check out the improvement! Feel free to see everyone else's improvement and see if you can tell what they worked on for those 3 minutes.
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Ejercicios Previos No. 5 - Abel Carlevaro (bar 14-17)
I know we should wait for the Livestream, but I'm recently struggling with a few bars in one of the preliminary exercises by Abel Carlevaro, and I wanted to record it before watching the Livestream.
I found those 7 Ejercicios Previos in the Micoestudios book, at first, I thought they were just warm-up exercises, I could just breeze through them, but I was wrong!
After 2 weeks, I still couldn't play No.5 smoothly (I have recorded and uploaded the other six exercises in the practice dairy), here is the passage I found challenging.
(can't wait to see what "hyper-focused 3 mins practice" means, hope that I could tackle this one after watching the Livestream)
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Wai That actually looks pretty difficult to me, Wai. I always find that kind of movement of fingers 3 and 4 really challenging. This should be a good test for whatever techniques Phil Goldenberg has in store for us.
Bravo for jumping in.
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Jack Stewart Thanks for the comment, Jack. Yes, this one is pretty hard, especially if you want to keep the melody legato, and Abel Carlevaro called it preliminary exercises...
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Wai well... this is exactly the kind of exercise where you need the School of Guitar book to understand his concepts for using position, movement and the arm. In Carlevaro's approach the fingers alone are kind of irrelevant in a musical context, do not mix up with a specific finger exercise focused for that, and it is more about «the arm places the fingers». Then, before showing you how this is done, how do you think it can be done in an optimized way, where it's less effort for better results, to keep flow and legato and not tire your hand and fingers?
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Blaise Laflamme Thanks for the advice, Blaise. Yes, I need to rethink the movement of the whole arm, I was trying different ways to play these few bars, and started feeling loose in my left hand.
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Wai This is a great Carlevaro exercise. Your left-hand index finger is fixed and so use it as a pivot or axis and when lifting your other fingers off the fret board, use a slight movement of the arm and less finger movement. I also agree with Blaise that being able to refer back to Carlevaro's book, School of Guitar would be very helpful. In any case, it is coming along nicely so keep working on it and do so slowly as Phil suggested in his workshop today.
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Dale Needles Thanks for the advice, Dale. "use a slight movement of the arm and less finger movement" is what I need to hear, I am working on it and hopefully, I can record a better take again this weekend.
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Wai Hey Wai! This does look like a challenging exercise, and one that will work with the 3-minute focused practice session. I think the best advice I can give on this section is to reduce the speed considerably and focus on the extraneous movements in the palm of your hand. If you watch the video, especially the "before" video, you can see that when you lift your pinky to play the next set of notes your pinky jumps away from the fret board and the palm of the hand turns away from the neck. Thats creating extra work when you go to put your pinky back down. I would try this exercise at about half speed and focus on keeping your pinky directly above the note you'd like it play (F#) for the entire measure. This can be very difficult, but if you slow it down enough it should be achievable. Once you've done this at a slow speed, it will be much easier to build on that success and bring the speed back up, rather than trying to achieve this difficult technique at a faster speed in the beginning.
Happy practicing!
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Phil Goldenberg Thank you very much, Phil. After watching the Livestream of your workshop, I already started seeing improvement in my practice time. I have never tried hovering my pinky over the F#, I will try to practice this way in these few days and update my progress on weekend. Thanks again for your time and suggestion.
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Hyper-focused practice = slow practice?
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don You will hear the answer to that and much more by Phil Goldenberg in his live stream tomorrow!
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Martin lol. Fantastic marketing!
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don
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Piazzolla Otono Porteno mm. 13 -16 and mm 21 - 24
I am hoping to use this month's challenge to finish learning this piece and to clean up problem sections in the pieces I have learned in the Challenges this past year.
These are 2 passages in Otono Porteno that have given me a lot of trouble. Sometimes I can play them (rarely) but never up to speed.
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Jack Stewart Thanks for sharing, Jack! Your dedication to learning difficult pieces is always inspiring, I think I also need to get out of my comfort zone and find something harder to learn. It's strange to see this challenge started so quietly, only 2 of us are making wishes to the Genie. (or maybe it's just the calm before the storm?)
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Wai I agree Wai, it is pretty quiet (What? no Eric!). I imagine people are waiting for more details as to how this will work. I am actually kind of glad it is not a challenge that encourages new pieces because I have so many pieces that have been rusting away or were never quite finished. I hope to do a lot of 'house cleaning' in this challenge.
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Jack Stewart Yes, I feel the same, glad that it's not another new music Challenge because I got nothing to share.
But if you ask me to show my weaknesses and mistakes, my materials are inexhaustible. 
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Jack Stewart Wai I’m still here guys! I am just waiting to hear from the first livestream, so I can have a clearer picture of what we’re supposed to do.
These two passages from Piazzola are already sounding pretty good to me, Jack.
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Eric Phillips Good to hear. I figured that was the case for most people - those with more sense than me and Wai.
I have a hard time playing those passages (and many other passages) in context and up to speed.
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Jack Stewart Very Nice. What transcription are you using? My only suggestion would be slow it down.
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Dale Needles Thanks Dale. I agree, my practice of these should be / will be much slower. These videos were to just establish where I am in playing these phrases. Guess kind of like a bench mark to compare progress (hopefully).
This is the Sergio Assad transcription I found in the Fall 1995 Guitar Review magazine I have. Those were the days!
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Jack Stewart Hey Jack! Great playing in those videos. I think for the top video, it will be more helpful to work on mental practice than on the 3-minute method. So often Campanella fingerings are easier than very left hand intensive fingerings, but they can be extremely confusing to our hands as well. If you took some time and mentally worked through each note (saying to yourself "C on the 6th string, 8th fret with 3rd finger, thumb plays mezzo forte. E on the 5th string, 7th fret with 2nd finger, i plays mezzo forte... etc.) of this section, I think you would see very fast results.
For the bottom video, that's a good candidate for working in a super focused 3 minute segment. I would focus rather than doing all 0:17 of that section, just working on the hardest 0:05-0:10 seconds of it. Overall it sounds pretty good already, and it seems like the last few seconds are giving you the most trouble so I'd focus exclusively on those few notes.
Great playing!
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Phil Goldenberg Thanks for the reply, Phil. I have taken your suggestion to heart and have been doing the 3' intensive on the last 2 segments of the second video. I think I will still do some work on the last phrase of the first video.
I haven't started the memory work yet but I think that is a great suggestion - just hard to do.
I have been trying to construct a practice schedule around these techniques. I assume I avoid work on the 3' intensives when working on the whole piece - or do I not work on the piece at all until the intensive sections are resolved?
Perhaps Ill try to sketch out my practice idea:
Piece A, Piece B, Piece C, Piece D
#1 25' - Piece A + 3' intensive Piece C
5' break
#2 25' - Piece B + 3' intensive Piece D (or the same intensive Piece C?)
5' break
#3 25' - Piece C (not including intensive segment) + 3' Piece A (different part than work in first practice)
or
Do I (can I) work on the same piece that I am doing the intensive practice but a different section?
I hope you can make some sense of this (BTW, if you can - explain it to me because I'm not sure I understand it.)
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Jack Stewart So rather than think of it as 25'+3', think of it as 25' worth of 3' sections. I assume that in each piece you have more than 1 section that needs work, so I would group all of those sections together in a 25' group. I think a question a number of people have had is when can I start practicing the whole piece again, and I really think that has the most to do with when you need to perform the piece. I'll usually work just on sections until about a month before a first performance/recording, and then I'll switch up my practicing to get ready for performing the whole piece. Preparing for performances and how to practice for that is the topic of my final livestream this month.
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Sor - Andante Largo mm 21-22 before and after 3-minute practice
I am playing the part in red brackets on the score. It's about two-and-a-half measures of music.
End of the Year Challenge: Finish Strong!
